ARTICLE

December 2002

Washington Pulse

by Elizabeth Book

Sikorsky Chief: Pentagon Policies Hurt Defense Industry
At a recent conference of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), Dean Borgman, president of Sikorsky Aircraft, charged that the U.S. defense industry is being undermined by the Defense Department’s support of free trade in markets that have previously been exclusively American.

DSCA, a Pentagon-funded agency, is set to “become a sales channel to European technologies, to third party countries. Especially countries that otherwise would never purchase a European product,” Borgman said.

Borgman said that the U.S. military services will have to decide “if the benefits of free trade and investment outweigh the benefits of a strong and vital defense business.”

“It’s not a stretch to call our country’s aerospace and defense industries a national treasure. It’s produced a true arsenal of democracy,” Borgman said. “Any major moves by the U.S. to open our defense market to Europeans, will represent unilateral disarmament,” he said.

Borgman expressed concern about recent legislative action in Congress to allow the Pentagon to bypass congressionally-mandated ‘Buy American’ laws for defense technologies.

“I think we’re about to have a very high-stakes debate, and the outcome of that debate will be measured in billions of dollars—with national security implications for critical technologies as well,” he said.

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Armitage Announces Overhaul of Export Control Process
Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state, recently announced that the defense export control process would be overhauled to become “more in tune with overall U.S. security goals,” he said. Speaking at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s annual meeting, Armitage said that President Bush had asked State Department leaders for a high-level management review of the policies that govern defense items exported to other countries.

“Developments you can expect to see in weeks or months: a defense trade licensing process that truly reflects our security objectives, and the roll-out of a six-month pilot program for licensing policy,” he said. The munitions list was also under scrutiny, he added.

Armitage said that the State Department is elevating the office of defense trade controls by assigning it to a deputy assistant secretary of state, as opposed to just a director.

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Wolfowitz: ‘Networked Information Age’ Is Beginning
“One could probably say the war in Afghanistan was kind of the dawn of the networked information age, and it is only just the beginning,” said Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, at a conference of the Government Electronics Industry Association.

He added that network-centric capability, tightly integrated communication and advanced interoperability were factors that determined the success of the U.S.-led operations in the region.

Wolfowitz said the success of Afghanistan should be applied to Iraq. “Our only hope of achieving that peaceful outcome, of achieving the peaceful disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, is if we can confront that regime with a credible threat of force behind our diplomacy. To be effective, the two have got to be part of a single policy.”

McCain Misses Vote on Defense Authorization Bill
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was so busy preparing to host the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live, that he missed the opportunity to cast his vote on the $355 billion defense spending bill.

The bill passed 93-1, but in published statements, McCain indicated that he opposed the bill’s contents. The legislation contained one of the largest defense spending increases in decades.

McCain, a longtime member of the Armed Services Committee and a U.S. Navy veteran, inserted a statement into the Congressional Record criticizing the bill’s “wasteful spending” on items added by members of Congress to aide their states.

“Over $7.4 billion in unrequested defense programs have been added,” McCain said. “The American taxpayers expect more of us, as do our brave servicemen and women who are, without question, fighting this war on global terrorism on our behalf.”

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Iraq Developing Nukes, but Lacks Fissile Material
“We know that they have an extensive body of scientists and technicians who know what they need to know to build nuclear weapons,” said John Bolton, under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. During a recent breakfast with defense reporters, Bolton discussed his concern regarding Iraqi weapons programs.

“What they have lacked has been fissile material, which is typically the pacing element in nuclear weapons programs,” he said.

But “predictions on what they might actually have or when they might acquire it or when they might be able to convert it into effective weapons, always risks error on the wrong side. That has been a major factor in our concern about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program,” Bolton said.

“They do have the knowledge and the capability to weaponize that material very quickly,” he said. Bolton added that there are “thousands of people whose goal in life is nuclear weapons development, and they’ve been sitting at their desks for 15 years,” he said.

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Force Protection Exhibition Set for May
The Defense Department’s Force Protection Equipment Demonstration is scheduled to take place on May 6 through 8, 2003 at the Quantico Marine Corps Base, in Va.

The genesis for the event was the June 25, 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 service members. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff hopes to use the event as a vehicle to field better protection equipment. The same event, held in 2001, drew more than 400 vendors who demonstrated and displayed nearly 1,400 technologies. Among the systems exhibited were barriers, sensors and detectors, access control systems, protective equipment, cargo inspection and explosives detection devices, blast and ballistics mitigation equipment, chemical/biological detection and mitigation equipment, biometrics and non-lethal weapons.

Details can be found at http://www.fped4.org.

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